


Passers-by

by astralis



Category: Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 10:00:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13028679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astralis/pseuds/astralis
Summary: The Travelling Symphony arrives in McKinley and two lives intersect again.





	Passers-by

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aishuu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aishuu/gifts).



McKinley was still wary from their second-hand encounter with the Prophet when the Travelling Symphony rolled into town. In a community where any deviation from the norm of daily life acquired probably greater prominence in the minds of its members than was probably deserved, strangers who shot people for dubious reasons became a shadow of fear that tainted daily life for a long time, and just because there were no guns visible it didn't mean that the Symphony didn't plan to shoot anyone.

Paranoia had saved them all, especially in those last few years after the collapse, and it wasn't paranoia when you were right about the bad things.

 _Survival is insufficient._ The words, emblazoned on the side of the first makeshift caravan, did little to settle anyone’s nerves. The sight of two children and a young teenager peeping from one of the windows did a little more, but the residents of McKinley locked their own children and a pregnant woman into the schoolroom under guard before a small group, chosen hastily and at random from the people who were there at the time, ventured forth to meet the newcomers.

The Symphony had been preceded by two scouts, who had ridden the length of the town and back again before stopping just before the motel to wait for the rest of their people. One was missing two teeth and both looked like they'd cut their own hair with knives in the dark and now it was the pair of them, with an older woman who looked more put together than she had any right to be, who came forward. “I’m the conductor,” said the woman. “And this is the Travelling Symphony.” She spoke the words with solemnity and almost as though she thought McKinley might have heard of them. McKinley had not, and its residents looked suitably unimpressed.

Some uncharitable part of Jeevan’s mind thought it looked more like a travelling circus, what with the sheer numbers of people who had walked into town behind the caravans. 

“Welcome to McKinley,” said someone. Even in paranoia there was still room for manners.

“If you’re willing to have us, we’d like to stop for a night or two, a safe place to pitch our tents in exchange for an evening’s entertainment. We can feed ourselves, and our animals.” The conductor made it sound like a polite request, which Jeevan decided to assume that it was.

Jeevan had never been particularly fond of the kind of music typically played by symphonies, but it was in trying to remember when he’d last heard anything other than his neighbours' off-key singing that he realized how much he missed it. In that instant he would have been willing to throw caution to the wind and invite the Symphony to move in, but Marissa’s wiser mind prevailed. Marissa taught math and science to the older children three afternoons a week and always liked to be clear about what was fact and what wasn't.

“Where have you come from?” she asked, her voice making it clear that this was a prelude to acceptance.

“All over," the conductor said, clearly recognizing the question for what it was. "Some of us from an army base in Massachusetts. Others, some of our actors, walked out of Chicago. Many of the others joined us on the road. But most recently we’ve come from the Severn City Airport, on our way to the coast.”

A trader who’d come through McKinley last week had claimed that the prophet had come from the airport. Jeevan’s neighbours clustered closer together and he knew he wasn’t the only one making the connection. “I don’t suppose you know any prophets,” he said, trying to keep his voice as cool as possible but ready to make snap judgements based on the answer.

One of the scouts, the one with the missing teeth, spoke then for the first time. “Prophet’s dead,” she said, and from that Jeevan deduced that they were on the same side. It wasn't the only thing that convinced the town to let them stay, but it helped.

*

The decision was made to let the Symphony camp beside the motel and the settlement’s children, freed from their temporary imprisonment in the school, came to admire the horses from a distance and to watch the speed and efficiency with which the strangers erected ramshackle tents and hung a faded backdrop from their caravans. That night they were to perform King Lear; the next what the conductor called “a feast of classical composers”.

Jeevan approached the night’s entertainment with a certain trepidation. He’d known King Lear well in another life, and he'd started watching it the night the Georgia flu came to Toronto. The death of the world he knew had begun with Arthur Leander’s death on stage and under Jeevan’s hands, synthetic snow on his head and a small girl on the stage and the horrified voices of the people around them. He would have avoided the entire performance but Daria wanted to go, had dressed up for it in her best sweater only two sizes too big, and their neighbour would watch Frank alongside her own daughter. There were no excuses left to be found and so Jeevan told himself that it wouldn't be so bad, not really. This play would have nothing more in common with the Toronto staging than words.

They took the baby, for practicality’s sake, and joined their neighbours in the grass in front of the Symphony's stage. 

The performance was a bare-bones sort of affair without lighting or sound effects. The actors acted as though they knew it, lines spoken boldly and with the confidence of constant repetition. Cordelia and Lear in particular played off each other with a kind of familiarity that made Jeevan wonder how many times they’d been through those exact scenes together. Or was it the enforced close quarters of life on the road, breakfasts and dinners and waking every morning to the sun?

Jeevan had had some of that on the road but he’d always lost his companions, sooner or later.

It wasn’t until Cordelia rose from the dead to take her bows that Jeevan realized she’d also been one of the Symphony’s scouts. As he watched the actors form a raggedy line she seemed to shed Cordelia’s innocence, her back straightening and face hardening as though she’d forgotten the real world for a time and now was remembering it.

She was young. Young enough, probably - it was hard to tell people’s ages these days; they seemed to age quicker than they had before - to have been a small child when the world changed. If she was lucky, she didn’t remember any of it.

She didn’t look like she felt lucky, but if there was one thing twenty years of survival had taught Jeevan it was that luck was relative.

*

Luck was relative, and so was coincidence. Jeevan took the dog to the river early the next morning, as he always did, to collect the day’s water for boiling. Cordelia was already there, busy about the same task with two teenage girls at her side and a small dog sniffing around her feet.

She tensed before she even turned around and Jeevan admired her instincts. He found the speed with which her hand went to the knives at her waist to be slightly less admirable, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t actually throw one at him.

He raised his water container slowly and carefully to make his intentions at the river clear, just in case he was wrong. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” Cordelia, who had swiftly and without Jeevan noticing put herself between him and the two girls, now looked at the older one. “That’s enough water for now. Alexandra, take Eleanor back to camp.”

“No it’s not,” Alexandra said, starting to talk before Cordelia had even finished. Her eyes flickered from Cordelia to the empty water containers on the ground, and back again.

“ _Alexandra_.”

“Good luck carrying all that yourself,” Alexandra said. Carrying a bucket full of water between them, moving slowly and carefully because it was full to the brim, the two girls turned away.

“I’m not interested in them,” Jeevan said, understanding coming belatedly.

“Can’t be too careful on the road.”

“No, I know. I walked it myself for a few years.”

“I’ve been walking for more than a few.” Her eyes still fixed on him, Cordelia knelt to fill a bottle.

Jeevan, in the spirit of co-operation and understanding and not having knives thrown at him, did the same. The two dogs were sniffing each other, Jeevan’s puppy wagging its tail in a way that was likely to mean he'd just found his new best friend and wanted to play the day away. “Where did you start?” he asked. It seemed safest to keep the conversation going.

Cordelia’s mouth twisted. “Toronto,” she said, after a moment.

Jeevan stood still for a moment, hearing again a word he hadn’t heard spoken aloud in years. “Toronto Ontario?”

“Toronto Canada,” Cordelia said, with a conviction that he thought was meant to cover uncertainty.

She must have been young indeed. “Same thing,” he said. “So did I.”

“Oh,” Cordelia said. “That’s nice.”

And before Jeevan could register the unexpected reaction, she was gathering up her containers, empty and full alike, and her dog and then she was gone.

*

Jeevan had been raised in Toronto but had failed to notice much of the city at all until he came back from Hollywood. Inching along Queen West in a packed streetcar at rush hour at the height of summer, trying to ignore the stench of the sweat of a dozen strangers and the young woman beside him talking loudly on a cell phone, knowing he was going to be late for whichever temporary job he’d been heading for at the time, Jeevan had been filled with a deep sense of familiarity and gratitude. No matter the roadworks or the scaffolding Toronto, in all its essential being, never changed. There was always the lake, always the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre beside it, always the subway, always the lights of Yonge-Dundas Square, always stale Timbits at three in the morning and the van that sold Beavertails down by the Harbourfront and Christmas markets at the Distillery, picture perfect even when he couldn’t afford anything more than a cup of coffee. He had left Toronto without much thought and returned without many options and found everything he needed still right where he'd left it.

The morning he met Cordelia, whose real name he hadn't thought to ask, Jeevan sat by the fire, waiting for the water to boil and with it the eggs for breakfast, and tried to remember the house he and Laura had shared in Cabbagetown, the kitchen he thought was painted yellow and the tree in the yard that might have been a maple. To be honest with himself would be to admit that he’d long since forgotten and didn't care to remember. Why he didn't want to remember was another question for another time and place.

What he remembered most clearly was Frank’s apartment, beginning with his early pangs of jealously that his brother could afford to live on the lakefront. Frank had not helped the situation at the time by suggesting that if Jeevan worked harder he could afford something similar, as though it was all about work and not at all about luck. Jeevan had been visiting from Los Angeles at the time, where he was sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three roommates and attempting to make ends meet by selling photos of celebrities in their most unfortunate moments. But that had been before the bullet that changed both their lives and by the time Frank was discharged from his rehab facility Jeevan had become grateful for the building’s attentive concierge and the wide doorways, no longer a luxury but a necessity.

In those better times, between the bullet and the Flu, Jeevan had liked to stand at the window and watch the world outside - the ferries and water taxis bobbing back and forth to the islands, the tall ship with the crew that sang pirate shanties to amuse tourists as they hoisted the sails and then sailed to nowhere and back again, the crowds that thronged the Harbourfront on a fine day and then, above it all, the little planes that commanded the skies, landing and taking off with confidence from an equally small island, visible markers of the invisible thread connecting Toronto to the world.

From his vantage point Jeevan had felt both a part of the city and separate from it, and leaving felt like waking from a dream and rejoining reality. Hit by a wall of heat in the summer or an icy chill in the winter, his ears would be assaulted by traffic and sirens and voices as he stood on the sidewalk deciding whether to hail a cab or deal with buses and streetcars on his way to his small and unremarkable home.

The city Jeevan had left had been an empty and silent one, and the Toronto he knew was a memory before he even set foot on the road. It had been years since he’d met someone who might remember the things he remember, or who might remember things he’d forgotten.

*

Jeevan spent the morning wondering whether it would be appropriate to brave the Symphony camp in an attempt to find Cordelia again and the afternoon being glad he hadn’t. She came to him, mid way through what he liked to call his clinic hours which really meant he sat in the clinic, cleaning and rearranging his meagre equipment and waiting in hope of a patient showing up.

“They told me I’d find you here,” she said, standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. The knives glinted on her belt and Jeevan knew she’d made a conscious choice to leave herself with an easy escape route. At least one of them had the power to leave if things started badly and become worse.

“Hello,” he said, trying not to sound too interested, too emotionally invested in this conversation. She’d come to him; that had to be a good sign.

“Were you from Toronto? Or just visiting?”

No preliminaries, none of the small talk that he'd never enjoyed anyway. “I was from there.”

“Did you know someone named Sarah Raymonde?”

Jeevan pretended to think about it because he had a sneaking suspicion that the only answer he could give was one Cordelia wasn’t going to like. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Sorry.”

She nodded. “Kevin Raymonde?”

Jeevan shook his head.

Cordelia nodded, looked at the floor and then back at him. “I didn’t think you would. But I had to ask.”

“Your parents?”

“Yeah. When I was younger I always dreamed of finding someone who knew them. Never have.”

She didn’t look like she was going to leave, so Jeevan went over and extended a hand. “Jeevan Chaudhary.”

“Kirsten. Raymonde.”

“It’s nice to meet someone from home, anyway.”

“It doesn't really feel like home, more a story, I guess. I was eight, so…” 

“What do you remember?” Jeevan asked, hoping he didn't sound inappropriately curious.

“Lights.” Kirsten came a few steps into the room. “Lights, everywhere. Noise, too. But mostly lights. The last night - the night the flu came - someone was driving me home, late at night, because they couldn't find my parents. I’d just seen a man die and my mother wasn’t coming for me and I thought that was the worst thing in the world, so I had my nose pressed against the car window because I didn't want anyone to see me if I cried and I was looking at the lights and I saw the tower, all lit up, just for a moment. I can’t remember what my mother looked like but I remember that.”

Something was stirring in Jeevan, a memory making itself known. “A man died?”

“Yeah. A play I was in. His name was Arthur. He just collapsed and died right there on stage.”

“Arthur Leander,” Jeevan said, knowing he wasn’t asking a question. Cordelia then; small and scared. Cordelia now; scarred and unreachable and somehow, by some coincidence, standing in his clinic.

“Did you know him?”

Jeevan remembered lurking outside Arthur’s house tricking Miranda into trusting him before he thought about Arthur’s death or that interview or the little girl on the stage. “I'd met him but I didn't really know him. But I was there too, that night.”

Kirsten looked at him, steady, bold, but behind her eyes he thought he saw something of that tearful, lost little girl. “You were the man who tried to save him.”

“Yes.”

“You were kind to me,” she said. “I always wondered who you were, what had happened to you. I guess I thought you were dead, like everyone else. Of all the questions I have - well, I guess at least one of them got answered. I’ll see you later,” she added, and then she was gone.

Jeevan was getting used to these sudden exits.

*

He tried to explain it all to Daria that night, how Arthur Leander’s death on a Toronto stage had given him the kind of conviction he’d never had before, a certainty that for the first time in his life he knew what he was supposed to be doing and wasn’t just existing in a sea of confusion hunting for his next big thing. How it had given him something to hold onto during those years on the road and had brought him, in the end, to her, when he’d settled in McKinley in order to apprentice himself to the doctor and finally learn something more than basic first aid. The story got jumbled in the telling: it was such a small moment but also such a big one, one that would have been bigger if the world he knew hadn’t come to end, if he’d had to explain himself to Laura, to Frank, to everyone he knew.

“And that’s that girl?” Daria asked. “The same one?”

She was and she wasn’t, the same way Jeevan wasn’t the person he’d been back then either. “Yes,” he said.

*

Kirsten came by again the next morning, while McKinley was recovering from the closest thing to a concert that any of them had experienced in years and the Symphony was gearing up to hit the road again. “I was right about the lights,” she said. “Wasn’t I?”

“Yeah.” Jeevan thought about telling her that every city was brightly light at night, that they’d all half forgotten or had never known what the stars really looked like until the lights went out. “Not just the tower but everywhere. Offices, apartments, billboards, streetlights, everything you can imagine.”

“If we got electricity back,” Kirsten said, quiet, serious, “do you think the lights would just come back on?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it before. I suppose some of the wires might be damaged, or the stuff that actually lights up.” Not having been much of an electrician before the flu, Jeevan struggled to explain what he meant.

“Right. I guess… but if we got electricity back we could fix it?”

“If you could find someone with the skills and any equipment you needed, yes, probably. I don’t know.” Jeevan was watching her face. She’d been on the road for years, seen a lot of things, visited a bunch of places, and she knew more about what was going on out there than she did. “Is there something I don’t know?”

Kirsten looked around as though checking for eavesdroppers. “Can you keep a secret?”

“I might tell Daria,” Jeevan said, honestly.

“I tell August everything.” Kirsten shrugged. “There’s a town out there with electricity. That’s where we’re going. Winter on the coast and then head back inland to try and find them.”

Jeevan’s mouth opened and then he closed it again. Thoughts of heating and air conditioning and running water and being able to turn on a light so he didn't trip over Frank's toys in the dark filled his mind. “How do you know?”

“You can see the lights from the control tower at the airport at Severn City. They didn’t have anyone who wanted to go find the electricity. We can, and we do. We’d been wanting to expand our territory for years so it all made sense for us to go and try to find them.”

“And then what?”

“Then we go back to the airport, maybe get electricity back there, get some way to communicate with the other town and just… link everything up. I don’t know.”

“Even if you can find this town they might not want to co-operate.”

“If they didn’t want visitors they wouldn’t be all lit up at night.”

“That still doesn’t mean they’re good people.”

“I know. But we’re careful. And if they are it’ll be worth it.”

“So your goal is to light up Toronto again?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever get back there again, unless the Symphony decides to go that way. Maybe we will. I just like thinking that it might be out there. That tower, all lit up.”

“There’s more to the city than the tower.”

“But I don’t remember much else. I remember the theatre where Arthur died, my house, my school, a few other things. A shopping mall, I think it was near the theatre. A park with big gates where we used to go to play. That kind of thing.”

The things Jeevan remembered would overwhelm him if he let them. “The tower’s a good enough thing to remember. It was basically a symbol of Toronto. And everyone needs a symbol.”

Kirsten nodded. “I guess we do. Not sure I’ve found mine yet but I’ll start with the tower. And electricity. And Shakespeare. Things that make sense.”

“Good luck,” Jeevan said, with the utmost sincerity. It was something they all needed and still in short supply. 

“I might see you again. We’ll probably come back this way, because it seems safe so far.”

“Can we have a comedy instead of a tragedy next time?”

“I’ll talk to Gil. We do a great Twelfth Night.”

“I’ll look forward to it, then.”

*

McKinley seemed emptier once the Symphony had disappeared into the distance. They got visitors from time to time, mostly traders or those who just kept on walking hoping to find something better in the next place, but not the volume of people that the Symphony had brought. Jeevan discovered that while he’d been thinking about Kirsten and Toronto one of the Symphony’s actors had given the kids a lesson on Shakespearean times and a sonnet to learn, and that one of his neighbours had touched a violin for the first time in twenty years (then been heartbroken to realize she’d lost most of the skill she once had), and that somehow, on the whole, the Symphony’s flying visit had brought more to the town than he might have expected.

That night, in the hours before the sun went down, Jeevan sat outside by the patch of dirt the kids sometimes used for working out math problems, and picked up one of the sticks set aside for such a purpose. In the space usually occupied by numbers he began to draw: first a tower, spindly and tall, then beside it a dome, and then skyscraper after skyscraper, the buildings that had sometimes made the downtown core feel oppressive, the buildings where thousands of people had lived and worked and played and died.

“What’s that?” Frank asked, approaching from behind.

Jeevan pulled his son into his lap. “Toronto. It’s where I’m from.” He pointed at the tower with a stick. “That’s the CN Tower. Some people hated it, but everyone who saw it knew it meant Toronto. That’s the Rogers Centre, where they had concerts and baseball games. So many people would go to watch. You can’t even imagine how many people.” He drew squiggles into the water. “And this is the lake. Your uncle Frank lived right near here.” Jeevan indicated a building mostly at random, near the tower and the water’s edge.

“Where is it?”

“It’s a long way away.”

Frank was silent for a moment, which usually meant he was puzzling something out. “You want to go back there?”

Jeevan wanted to wind the clock back twenty five years and find a way to stop the Georgia Flu and bring Daria to Toronto for him to meet. And then he wanted word on what was happening there now: it was possible there was still life in Toronto, or life again; that people were living in the Rogers Centre or the Eaton Centre or bringing music and business back to Yonge Street. But, like Kirsten, he’d probably never know.

He kissed the top of Frank’s head and breathed in the still, clean air that always seemed to purify him a little more when he took the time to appreciate it. “No,” he said. “Not now. This is my home now.”


End file.
